phpmail() IS OUT! Get rid off it. Now!

One of the most common sources of spam are “hacked” webservers and poorly or even non-secured forms. By using phpmail the webserver must be allowed to send mails without checks for a valid sender. This results – mostly on a shared web host – in having checking every clients installations for the bad script while the mailserver gets blacklisted due to the spam wave.

There are enough possibilities out there on how to send mail without using phpmail such as PEAR Net_SMTP. I even encourage every webmaster to turn off phpmail by blacklisting this function in php.ini. This way the developers would be forced to name an smtp account for sending mail which is much easier to track (and shut off if neccessary).

easy_install http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

Since the release of Subversion 1.5 the version of easy_install included in the Debian repository ran into a compatibility issue. Instead of working as expected it always complained:

error: Unexpected HTML page found at http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/trac/branches/0.11-stable

The problem seems to be that the SVN-Web-Output generated by Subversion 1.5+ is not being understanded by setuptools. In the issue tracker for the trac-plugin-project trac-hacks.org I found the easiest way to solve this problem. You will use the setuptools to update itself and then you won’t have problems anymore:

easy_install -U setuptools

PS: This problem also occured when trying to install plugins from trac-hacks.org since they also use SVN 1.5+.